There’s a fabulously loaded moment in Bouchra when a seductive mother bear confesses to the title character, an anthropomorphic coyote, “I love your chipped tooth, and the way you lick it all the time.” A tight close-up shows us one of Bouchra’s upper canines, which we’ve seen protruding sharply from her jaw in myriad shots throughout the film without noticing anything, visibly chipped for the first time. In that moment, we register a seismic change in Bouchra’s understanding of her life and how she relates to the different worlds she moves through.
Bouchra is about those moments when subtle shifts change how you understand what you’ve thought of as familiar. Like the tooth, these shifts seem to come naturally in animation. Because we have fewer expectations about how the world we’re seeing on the animated screen should behave, we can be more open to something suddenly turning into something else. In live-action, we’d assume a continuity error; in Bouchra, we unpeel another layer of an artist’s difficult character.
The chipped canine is one example of what directors Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani describe as their “spontaneous” approach to the typically “rigid” form of animation, blocked out from start to finish before filming begins. Bouchra’s creators found a process that allowed them to “re-record and develop the story as we went.” In a self-reflexive film about a self-reflexive filmmaker making a film about her artist mother Aicha, her Moroccan past and her New York present, this nimble process produced a work full of surprises.
I was not expecting the elevator in Bouchra’s nightmarish apartment building to start singing to her midway through the story, the sill gap opening like lips into the deep shaft. Such surprises open her character in new ways. The singing steel sills do not explain the elevator phobia Bouchra shares with her mother. In a story that is obsessed with the past, there are no big reveals or cathartic answers. Her mother knows that artists spend their lives finding new ways to give form to the same questions. Bouchra is on the same path. So is the film.
Instead of catharsis, there are depths that become abruptly, sometimes shockingly visible to us, like a beringed hand, clad in sleek black fur like a silken glove, elegant nails poised to crack open an egg. The tight close-up strips the shot of context, allowing it to evoke both the disembodied monkey’s paw stirring a cup of coffee in the pre-credits of Jordan Peele’s 2022 sci-fi horror film Nope and Audrey Hepburn’s ingenue in Paris culinary school in Billy Wilder’s 1954 romantic comedy, Sabrina.
That doubleness, part of the filmmakers’ desire “to avoid creating binary characters who were ‘bad’ or ‘good’” provides the film much of its tension and power. All of the characters in Bouchra are anthropomorphic animals, simultaneously indie riffs on Zootopia’s dayglo menagerie and hyperrealist descendants of Maus’ stylized mice, cats, pigs, and dogs. Bouchra’s fangs, like her mother’s, embody this doubleness and depth. They’re always present in the close-ups, gleaming in the foreground of a usually dark backdrop. Like a coyote, they can snap at any time.
Also like a coyote, those fangs spend most of their time resting in plain sight as the characters joke, gossip, create, flirt, kiss, lick. Never, that I can recall, do they literally bite or tear into flesh. Nevertheless, Bouchra and her immediate family are the only characters with visible teeth. It’s Bouchra’s ex-lover Nikki, a cow so sleek I thought she was a giraffe until corrected by the press kit, who does the most damage. Looks can be deceiving. Bouchra’s and Aicha’s fangs can certainly bite, just not when or in the way we expect them to.
Bouchra opens with a gorgeous credit sequence that somehow makes new the oldest cliché in moviemaking: a NYC subway train. The animation, created by cinematographer John Michael Boling and character designer Jason Coombs, places the animated creatures in photographically realistic settings (shot in live action in Brooklyn and Casablanca, and processed in CGI). The rolling stock, an old J train, gleams in the morning sun behind the credits, every dent and smudge and shadow inviting our lingering attention.
The camera slowly dollies in on Bouchra, who is attentive to her own screen, a video broadcast of a Casablanca talk show, Arabic music and dialogue wafting out of the phone and onto the train. The moment is interrupted by her mother phoning, setting off the main plot: Bouchra’s excavation of her mother’s reaction to a coming-out letter she had sent to them from New York years before. We’re just as much, if not more, involved in the visual world of Bouchra’s life in which this drama is embedded as in the drama itself.
Like the languages—Moroccan Arabic, French, and English—that Bouchra seamlessly switches between, the immigrant story and the coming-out story are so achingly familiar they need no rehearsal or exposition. Instead, Barki notes that Wong Kar Wai’s psychological drama, Chungking Express, was “a visual inspiration” for the film, and it’s a telling nod. Chungking Express was made more or less on a lark as a two-month break in the laborious production of Wong’s portentous wuxia epic Ashes of Time. His 1995 new-wave gem saturates the viewer in the sounds and images of a cityscape that overdetermines any narrative impetus.
Chungking Express’s interwoven storylines and urban anomie mean less than the form they take in Christopher Doyle’s kinetic cinematography and Wong’s refusal to resolve anything in his characters’ lives. Technically, it’s a dark, depressing film about alienation. Every time I see it, though, it’s a blast, a feature-length music video from heaven. That’s how Bouchra felt to me. The film has so many visually stunning frames, so many moments that make the familiar strange and newly beautiful, and so many unexpected conversations with other films and works of art. These moments don’t deny or overlook the lives and dramas happening within them. Instead, they provide new ways to feel and experience them.
These new ways break down formal barriers while acknowledging gaps and blocks that will never disappear. A poster for Bouchra reproduces one such moment, a silhouetted shot of Casablancan youths jumping off a rock cliff to swim in the sea. Their postures simultaneously suggest animal heads (at least to an eye trained by the first hour of the film) and the slouched posture of the figures in Georges Seurat’s iconic post-impressionist painting from 1884, Bathers at Asnières. Sure, there’s plenty to unpack in that reference, but I doubt that’s the main reason it’s there.
In the film, the divers serve as a backdrop to a fraught conversation between Aicha and Bouchra at a nearby clifftop café. Why wouldn’t a pair of Moroccan visual artists read this scene through the colonial artistic vocabulary they would have been trained in? Why wouldn’t they also read it according to whatever local knowledge they have about these kids? After all, in prior scenes, we’ve watched Bouchra confidently navigate streets where similar animal-headed youths are perched in ways a Western eye would likely read as threatening, but she apparently does not. Also, why wouldn’t mother and daughter carry on their conversation without even remarking on a setting that also neatly informs us of their relative privilege: conversing in French within their native city?
A similarly charged motif begins in a gallery where we join Bouchra in contemplating a large-scale oil painting. A lizard approaches her, a new character who will turn out to be her closest friend, Yani, a visitor from Bennani and Barki’s web series 2 Lizards. In a later scene, Bouchra gifts her mother a book by Lebanese visual artist and poet Etel Adnan, opening it to a two-page spread reproducing the same painting. She explains that it’s a painting of Marin County’s Mount Tamalpais, north of San Francisco, a site Adnan revisited repeatedly.
Unfamiliar with Adnan’s work, I was uncertain until the closing credits whether the art was created for the film or freestanding. Bouchra creates its own internal network of meanings; however, it also acknowledges that each viewer brings different additional meanings and experiences to it. I’m certain that the Arabic songs and Moroccan media signify differently to viewers with linguistic expertise or specific memories attached to them. I’m certain that Brooklyn resonates differently to viewers familiar with its sights and sounds.
None of this is anything new to moviegoers. What is new with Bouchra—or at least startlingly refreshing—is the intensity with which the camera lingers on its often extraordinary visual creations. Furries are familiar; the jarringly surreal marriage of hyperrealism and Pixar stylization is less so. The long, erect coyote ears with earrings clipped halfway down read simultaneously like body piercing and mainstream femininity. Kissing and caressing translate as anthropomorphic simulations of human intimacy; tender licking with canine or bovine tongues not so much.
Not knowing what’s culturally accepted or familiar and what’s dangerous or transgressive is a rite of passage for an immigrant or visitor to a foreign culture. It’s the same thing for someone stepping outside of mainstream sexuality for the first time. From the opening of the film, it’s evident that Bouchra has learned how to be a lesbian in Brooklyn, even if she struggles as much as anyone with her individual relationships. When she buys a coffee and the server writes “Bob” on her cup because he can’t understand her name, we’re reminded that she will never be fully at home in Brooklyn, either. When she’s back in Casablanca with a Moroccan bear, single mother of her young cousin’s schoolmate, we’re not so sure, either.
Being fully at home is not the purpose of any art, however; it’s more about seeing and understanding the experience of never being fully at home. Few if any viewers will find themselves fully at home in the extraordinary world Barki, Bennani, and their collaborators have created in Bouchra. Nor, I expect, are the artists. What a blessing, though, to be invited in for a visit. Just don’t be surprised at the teeth marks you may discover on the way out. Coyotes may have returned to New York over the last few years, but they’re no more domesticated than the rest of us.